1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid droplet ejecting apparatus, such as an ink jet printer, which ejects liquid to a recording medium.
2. Description of Related Art
An ink jet printer needs to eject ink from nozzles of an ink jet head onto target pixels on a sheet. Therefore, a nozzle surface of the ink jet head is located close to the sheet. On this account, if the sheet moving in a printing area bends, it may contact the nozzle surface of the ink jet head. If the sheet contacts the nozzle surface, the nozzle surface is rubbed to be worn away, and the sheet gets dirty. To solve this problem, a cover member may be disposed around the nozzle surface of the ink jet head. The cover member is disposed to project beyond the nozzle surface toward the sheet, and is formed so as not to block the orbit of the ink ejected from the nozzles (see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication 2003-72041 for example).
The cover member is required not to obstruct a wiping operation of wiping excess ink and stains from the nozzle surface. Therefore, the cover member can move up and down by an electric-powered cylinder. To be specific, when the wiping operation starts, the cover member is caused to move up by the electric-powered cylinder while being guided by a guide rail of a base. Thus, the cover member moves away from the sheet to be located more distant from the sheet than the nozzle surface.
However, since the cover member is driven by the electric-powered cylinder, the entire apparatus increases in size. In addition, it is difficult to precisely control the distance from the cover member to the sheet by the electric-powered cylinder.